PROUST AMONG THE STARS; By Malcolm Bowie; Columbia University Press: 352 pp., $28

Among the many brilliant developments in Malcolm Bowie’s book on Marcel Proust, the most striking may be the one that concerns the novelist’s moral imagination. It leads to an unexpected redefinition of virtue. Bowie’s very personal voice, his ability to be tersely abstract while remaining closely bound to the sensuous rhythms of the narrative, suffices to renew one’s faith in the value of literary criticism. He can say more in three sentences than many a scholar in a belabored chapter. His erudition is graceful, and his references, including classical sources, are not presented to flaunt his knowledge but to bring the reader into more meaningful contact with the text under discussion. This is criticism motivated by intellectual joy, creatively sustained by felicities of expression. Whether Bowie writes of the narrator’s many voices, his talents as mimic or magpie, the teasing and caressing syntax of the Proustian sentence or the sexual and social labyrinth of exacerbated desires, there is aphoristic pleasure to be derived from almost every page of this book.

STELLA ADLER ON IBSEN, STRINDBERG AND CHEKHOV; Edited by Barry Paris; Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pp., $27.50

In his tribute to Elia Kazan at the 70th annual Academy Awards, Martin Scorsese remarked that Kazan introduced a new style of acting into American movies. Clips from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “East of Eden,” “On the Waterfront,” “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass” showed this style in action, and it doesn’t lessen Kazan’s brilliance as a director to point out that the style couldn’t have existed without Stella Adler. “Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov” is edited with great skill by Barry Paris, who extracted the essence of Adler from 3,000 pages of transcripts of her lectures to young actors at the drama school she founded in 1949. The book is not for actors only but for anyone interested in theater. No critic has written or talked about theater, including as these playwrights, with more insight and passion.

THE INFORMATION AGE; Economy, Society and Culture; Volumes I-III; By Manuel Castells; Blackwell: 1,460 pp., $27.95 each vol.

The three volumes of “The Information Age,” taken together, are a truly stunning achievement. Manuel Castells comes as close to being our owl of Minerva (Hegel’s canny philosophical spectator who “takes flight only at dusk”) as we are likely to have--a scholar who, with remarkable mastery, has brought his experience over a lifetime to bear on astonishingly diversified data sets, pulling them together into a compelling account of the complex relationship between the progressive and reactionary, the globalizing and particularizing forces that are transforming our perplexing world. From the time of the Enlightenment, a cunning dialectic of irony has made emancipation through technology the condition for new, invisible forms of servitude. Castells has captured the dialectic brilliantly and restored to us the possibility of human liberation--through, but also in spite of, our technological progress. His project is thus imbued with what for our times is a rare nobility animated by a spirit that refuses to be drowned by its own creations and governed by a mind that would persuade us that reason can still temper and contain (if not fully master) its own infinite informational fragments and its infernal globalizing systems.

THE GREAT DISRUPTION; Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order; By Francis Fukuyama; The Free Press: 354 pp., $26

Tthe heart of this book, its contribution to the cultural debate, is informed by a rich body of important scholarship that is virtually unknown among not only East Coast intellectuals but also Wired-style exponents of the “New Economy.” Drawing on serious empirical and theoretical work from fields ranging from evolutionary game theory to animal behavior, Francis Fukuyama provides a lucid course in what he rightly argues is “one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century”: “the systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in a spontaneous and decentralized fashion.” “The Great Disruption” is an important and ambitious work. It promises to communicate unconventional ideas to political intellectuals bound by convention and thus to inject much-needed vitality and realism into stale and stylized debates. In a nonthreatening and serious way, Fukuyama is making another bold claim: that the trial-and-error processes of a free society lead not to decay but to discovery, not to disorder but to new and ever-evolving forms of order.

ODD MAN IN; Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture; By Suzanne Muchnic; University of California Press: 314 pp., $29.95

“Odd Man In” is the story of one man’s obsessive and astonishingly successful drive to amass the greatest art collection money could buy in the second half of the 20th century, long after the robber barons had scoured Europe for the best it had to offer. It’s a story of power and money and the role they play in the higher echelons of the art world. It’s a story of deals and betrayals, of the museum monopoly game of egos and edifices, of the way our cultural institutions are driven by the sometimes imperious egos of the super wealthy and the boards they sit on. And from a broader perspective, it’s the story of the cultural birth pangs of Los Angeles in its catch-up struggle to become a cosmopolitan city as the author, Los Angeles Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic, turns the raw stuff of art world lore and scandal into history by thorough documentation and careful narration.

ADULTERY And Other Diversions; By Tim Parks; Arcade: 192 pp., $21.95

What a delight to see how Tim Parks gets better over the years. Rather than becoming the travel-writing dilettante that would ensure good food on his table, he has pursued a contemplative, questioning mix of fiction, nonfiction and old-fashioned essay writing (like “Adultery”), intertwined with translations of such writers as Roberto Calasso and Italo Calvino. He is one of those rare writers who really does his best work when he lets his mind go wandering: I like these essays on adultery and translation and fidelity and advice to friends and raising children more even than his novels (most recently “Europa”) or his stories about living in Italy (“Italian Neighbors” and “An Italian Education”). Compared to the essays, the fiction seems a bit disingenuous, as though he were pretending to know the answers to the questions he poses so freely and tries to answer. I think that Parks, particularly in the essays concerning marriage, understands the humor and terror of modern life. (“Could it be that there is a sort of pact between conventional morality and the information culture?”) He thinks out loud, and it is very physical. He throws his arms around a subject and squeezes it. We find his revelations comforting but, more important, we find his joy in arriving upon them contagious.

ANOTHER LIFE; A Memoir of Other People; By Michael Korda; Random House: 514 pp., $26.95

“Another Life” may be on one level a popular history of the publishing business, but its readers will come for the stories, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Michael Korda is, simply, a wonderful raconteur with an almost Dickensian eye for physical detail. The stories in “Another Life” are so much fun that for many they will obscure the larger story Korda has to tell--about an industry that got so big it lost its way--but no matter. Korda would rather entertain, and he prides himself, rightly, on going with the flow. If he regrets the sober new world publishing has become, he’s careful not to say so. But there’s no mistaking the rueful chill that sets in at the end of the book, as colleagues depart and people talk about “the end of an era.” “Another Life” is catnip for insiders and a delight for everyone else.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PANCHO VILLA; By Friedrich Katz; Stanford University Press: 1,032 pp., $29.95 paper

Friedrich Katz’s “The Life and Times of Pancho Villa” is a masterpiece of contemporary historiography. Together with John Womack’s “Zapata,” it forms a diptych of great biographies of leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Francisco Villa created his own power. He inherited it from no one. The drama of his remarkable story derives from seeing how that power, won by a dispossessed man, is ultimately lost. Diligent, extremely well-documented, fluid and elegant at all times, “Pancho Villa” presents Mexicans with our ghosts--alive.

MORGAN; American Financier; By Jean Strouse; Random House: 800 pp., $34.95

As Jean Strouse’s fascinating book makes clear, there was more than one Pierpont Morgan. At the center was the Man himself, a presence who awed all who came into contact with him. No one else has told the story of Morgan in the detail, depth and understanding of Strouse, who spent nearly a decade searching for the living truth behind the mythology of Morganalia. This effort took Strouse to many previously unexplored sources of the Morgan saga, some in neglected documents, others in the memories of acquaintances. It is a riveting detective story and a masterpiece.

FAREWELL TO AN IDEA; Episodes From a History of Modernism; By T.J. Clark; Yale University Press: 452 pp., $45

T.J. Clark’s book is exhilarating to read because, like everything of Clark’s, it is clearly, almost seductively, written. What is more, it is shot through with his passion for the pictures he has chosen to consider: You can almost sense him running his fingers over the surface of the paintings to assess the way pigment has been applied--whether with palette knife or brush or finger--to the canvas or panel, the way tones merge from broken and contrasting colors. Yet for all his love of the particular, there is nothing episodic about the book: However vivid the detail, it is always grafted onto some theoretical considerations. If you are at all interested in the painting of the last century, you will have to read the book.

CHILDHOOD; By Patrick Chamoiseau; University of Nebraska Press: 124 pp., $40 cloth, $15 paper

Lovers of language, rejoice! A new Chamoiseau has flown north for the winter. If this name means nothing to you, then you’re in for a discovery. “Texaco,” Patrick Chamoiseau’s only novel, won the French Prix Goncourt in 1992 and created a whisper in American ears. With its translation and publication in 1997, along with a volume of “Creole Folk Tales” and the memoir “School Days,” Chamoiseau’s portraits of his native Martinique exploded into the English language in a fascinating mixture of classical oils and Creole colors.

The new Chamoiseau is, in fact, his oldest. This second memoir, “Childhood” was written first, in 1989, and chronicles the preschool days of the author. Chamoiseau’s cousins-in-memoir are not the Kathryn Harrisons and Frank McCourts of the plot-rich, tortured childhoods, but the Derek Walcotts and Marcel Prousts, whose memories are haunted by ghosts and scents, lodgings and longings. What is glorious, as always, is Chamoiseau’s poetry, whether the subject is childhood (“a treasure whose geography you never clearly reveal”) or twilight (“A tormented red dripping from the sky bloodied the upper facades and the dusty windows. Then--whop!--shadow swallowed everything. Chomp!--like a mongoose at the neck of a chicken.”) It is the grown Chamoiseau’s mastery of language rather than psychology that justifies the examination of the past. “Memory,” he cries in one Homeric invocation, “let’s make a pact long enough for a sketch, lower your palisades and pacify the savages, reveal the secret of the traces that lie at the edge of your brushy borders. I bring neither sack for kidnapping nor knife for conquest, nothing but intoxication and a mighty docile joy at the rhythm (flow of time) of your flow.” We cry with him, not sympathetic memoir tears of broken bones and broken homes but with the real pain of time lost.

THE DIARY OF VASLAV NIJINSKY; The Unexpurgated Edition; Edited by Joan Acocella; Translated from the Russian by Kyril FitzLyon; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 304 pp., $30

The dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the most celebrated, brilliant and mad artists of the 20th century. He seemed to confirm the link that many believe exists between madness and artistry because both involve a certain unhinging of one’s imagination from immediate reality. He left, according to Joan Acocella, editor of the riveting new unexpurgated edition of his diary, “the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.” Nijinsky’s complete diary, in addition to giving the anatomy of a mental breakdown, is an extraordinary portrait, through Nijinsky’s emotional lens, of the relationship between the artist and society. Nijinsky’s story has fascinated for decades because it suggests the most extreme risks and challenges of remaking one’s body as the artistic medium of dance. Now with Nijinsky’s diary at last available in its entirety, in a richly literate and annotated translation, his final tortured effort to communicate his inner demons is complete. Acocella is a masterful midwife to this extraordinary tale.

PUSHKIN’S BUTTON; By Serena Vitale; Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 352 pp., $30

Mark Twain, even as he had his own iconic white outfits photographically imprinted on the public’s imagination, admonished us that not “the clothes and buttons of the man” but his thoughts should be the focus of a writer’s biography. “Pushkin’s Button” embeds the still-mysterious story of Pushkin’s last years, love(s) and works, duel and death in a richly costumed and often comic portrayal of Russia’s repressive court society during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, “the gendarme of Europe.” It will keep all constituencies of readers fastened to their seats as they watch Petersburg’s lofty denizens leave no moment of the hurtling Pushkin scandal unrecorded or not speculated upon. Serena Vitale has restored to Pushkin a will to power that exhibited itself as absolutely in its aesthetic mastery as in its drive to self-immolation: a Nietzschean vision. The world of Petersburg pleasures--clothing, streets, public events, jokes, balls and literary controversies--springs up vividly under her pen.

LOST AT SEA; An American Tragedy; By Patrick Dillon; The Dial Press: 264 pp., $23.95

It is thrilling to read about the risks that other people take, but not far beneath the thin layer of romance lies the banality, pointlessness and even stupidity that are so often the byproducts of those risks. We know this from gobbling up books like “The Perfect Storm,” “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air.” In the end, we feel smug about staying home, even as we felt envious of these lives when we first opened the books. Patrick Dillon, former editor and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, has written a gripping account of two crabbing vessels lost in the Bering Sea in 1983. As Sebastian Junger did in his description of Gloucester, Mass., Dillon’s portrait of the community these boats sail from, Anacortes in Washington, is rich, historic and compelling, like the sea itself. Generations are fed to the crabbing industry until it dries up. Risks are taken with marine safety regulations in the name of greed, and by the end of “Lost at Sea,” 14 new names are added to the 96 missing seamen whose names are inscribed on the obelisk on the Anacortes dock. Dillon differs from Junger (perhaps because he is more of a journalist than a fiction writer) in his reticence to enter the minds of the lost fishermen. He does not, for example, include a hypothetical chapter depicting the moments before the boat went down. There is something fine and dignified about his refusal to take that risk and make those assumptions that makes “Lost at Sea” a better book than Junger’s, even more thrilling because it is more mysterious.

BYRON; Child of Passion, Fool of Fame; By Benita Eisler; Alfred A. Knopf: 814 pp., $35

In the boyhood of Judas, it has been said, Jesus was betrayed. Byron would certainly have approved of the line and the sentiment too. For a flying start in life, a twisted boyhood is indispensable. Born as one of those lucky people who arrive on Feb. 29 and thus don’t have to count their birthdays in the same lugubrious way as the rest of us, Byron entered the world with a malformed right foot as his birthright of resentment. The lesson was driven home, as it were, by sadistic doctors who screwed the limb into pointless wooden restraints. One of his tutors in Greek and Latin, who could see the agony thus inflicted, observed to him in his 12th year: “My lord, I don’t feel comfortable at having you sitting opposite me there, in such pain as you must be.” The tough little lordling responded: “Never mind, Mr. Rogers, you shall not see any signs of it in me.” This recalls the infant John Stuart Mill, replying to some matronly tenderness over a skinned knee with the words: “Thank you, madam. The pain has sensibly abated.” Byron always had Mill’s indignation about injustice and oppression, yet he comes down to us as one who hated these things rather than criticized them and who set out to overturn, in words and deeds, those systems and mentalities that he found beneath contempt and beyond reform. Benita Eisler, whose book will be the one to beat for many decades to come, is especially artful and dexterous in matching the poetry to the life and the ideas. She is alive to the essential connection between the sexual outlaw and the professional revolutionary.

THE THINGS WE USED TO SAY; By Natalia Ginzburg; Translated from the Italian by Judith Woolf; Arcade: 210 pp., $23.95

A model for so many writers in this country, Natalia Ginzburg translates beautifully into English because her prose is so clear and pure and simple, like that of Pushkin or Chekhov or the writer she translated, Proust. Particularly in this memoir of her own childhood, Proust’s influence on her writing burns through. It is the “lexicon,” the “Latin” language of inside jokes and stories and phrases invented and repeated again, over dinner tables in Turin, in Florence, in Rome, in the mountains, that reminds a reader of the power of a simple, particular memory and how its invocation brings all the senses to offer up their pieces of the penumbra. In the foreground of “The Things We Used to Say” sits Natalia’s father, an anti-fascist, irredentist curmudgeon who hates modern art, modern life and the yahoos he finds himself surrounded by at home and at the university, where he is a professor. Then there is Lidia, Natalia’s mother, with her periodic rages and her humor; and Natalia’s brothers and sisters: Mario, Gino, Alberto and Paola. In the background are the rise of fascism and World War II. Her family, except for Lidia, is Jewish--Natalia marries a friend of her brother Mario’s, Leone Ginzburg, who is imprisoned and killed by the Nazis during the occupation. “My mother and father both seemed old at the end of the war,” Ginzburg writes in the characteristic understatement that reveals her fierce intelligence.

THE TRUST; The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times; By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones; Little, Brown: 870 pp., $29.95

There are many moments in the full flow of this rollicking tale of the Ochses and the Sulzbergers when one has to remind oneself that this is The New York Times, for heaven’s sake. “The Trust” is a serious history of the family that has owned and run The New York Times for a century, but the reporting is so juicily relentless that one feels guilty having one’s eye pressed unwaveringly at the keyhole of so many intimacies. This is an excellent biography, thoroughly researched, important for an understanding of a great institution--and more entertaining than any soap.

ANDRE GIDE; A Life in the Present; By Alan Sheridan; Harvard University Press: 710 pp., $35

Alan Sheridan acknowledges his sustained sequential narrative of Andre Gide’s life, undertaken almost 50 years after Gide’s death, to be a “hybrid form,” a literary biography without the compurgations of theory; yet so scrupulous is his engagement in the inextricably fertile clutter of a very long career and a very labile oeuvre that “A Life in the Present” proves to be the best book on Gide yet written. Certainly Sheridan’s is the first book anyone interested in this author should consult after reading Gide’s own work and--in the case of certain precariously “sincere” Gidean texts, such as “Corydon”--even before.

LEAVE NONE TO TELL THE STORY; Genocide in Rwanda; By Alison Des Forges; Human Rights Watch: 790 pp., $35 paper

Though several first-rate books have been written about the Rwandan genocide--works by Colette Braeckman, Philip Gourevitch and Gerard Prunier come to mind--the reality of the genocide remains occluded. It may be too early, now that the reporting has been done, to hope for anything except a book that will establish what actually took place in an authoritative and exhaustive way.

Extraordinarily, that book has been written. “Leave None to Tell the Story” will stand as the definitive investigation into what occurred during the Rwandan genocide. And yet apparently no mainstream U.S. publisher was willing to risk bringing the book out; this in an era when “Schindler’s List” is required viewing for many high school students and when Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” is an international bestseller. Poor Africa. “Leave None to Tell the Story” appears under the aegis of the American-based Human Rights Watch and the French-based International Federation for the Rights of Man, and it is a foregone conclusion that it will not get the same kind of attention.

But whatever the reasons are, they have nothing to do with either the quality or the accessibility of the book. Of course, humanly it is almost unbearable to read a book about Rwanda that details, prefecture by prefecture and commune by commune, how the killing was organized, who carried it out, what the murderers and the surviving victims remember and what the role of such foreign countries as the United States and France, and of the United Nations system, really was. But it should not be more unbearable than Goldhagen’s book or Lucy Dawidowicz’s magisterial “The War Against the Jews.”

Knowledge, in short, may not always be power nor lead to justice. But surely truth is a value. In the end that is likely to be the greatest contribution Alison Des Forges has made by writing “Leave None to Tell the Story.” She has established the truth of the Rwandan genocide, once and for all. She has done so without fear or favor (the book ends with a chronicle of crimes and mass killings committed by the RPF) and in the somber and authoritative tone appropriate for this tragedy. No one involved--not the Rwandans themselves, not the French, or the Americans or the United Nations--will be able to peddle the self-exculpating fictions again without fearing that someone will be able to quote the truth, as told in Des Forges’ book, back at them. The Rwandan story is one of defeat on every score; nothing anyone can do now will ever set things right. Perhaps paradoxically, that is why telling the truth is so important. And Alison Des Forges has told the truth.

WHAT THE TWILIGHT SAYS; Essays; By Derek Walcott; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 246 pp., $23

“Both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom,” writes Derek Walcott of his childhood and education in St. Lucia, “hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began.” Therein lies the force of Walcott’s creation--poetry, plays, essays: elation and ambition. These essays reveal a spine, a sine curve of energy and exhaustion, exposing the sources of his bitterness (race) and of his desire (poetry). Walcott describes his struggle with race: “that wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to escape,” and his transcendence of that struggle: “[O]nce we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers.” And in a million ways, he describes his love of poetry: “There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life.” The essays on fellow writers--Robert Lowell (“He had married often but his muse was not widowed”), Ted Hughes (“the malicious midden that is in Ted Hughes”), V.S. Naipaul (the damning comment: “Trinidad injured him. England saves him”) and others--reveal a talent for king-making more reminiscent of Shakespeare than of any other living writer. Walcott could reconfigure the cells in a human body with his pen.

THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE; Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory; By Brian Greene; W.W. Norton: 448 pp., $27.95

“The Elegant Universe” is an ambitious, patient and frequently personal attempt to bring both the beauty and substance of string theory down to Earth for the general public. As “The Elegant Universe” shows, the entire history of string theory, in fact, makes a compelling human saga: Discovered only to be discarded time and time again, resurrected repeatedly--like an off-again, on-again love affair that against everyone’s expectations turned out (maybe) to be the real thing. So is the universe a symphony played by strings? Only time and space (and experiments) will tell. In the meantime, “The Elegant Universe” offers a thrilling ride through a lovely landscape that will undoubtedly play an important role in whatever canvas the physicists eventually unfold.

MEAN JUSTICE; By Edward Humes; Simon & Schuster: 492 pp., $26

We wish this were a novel. Then we could all maintain a few of the delusions still standing about justice and how it is served in America. But Edward Humes has made us another fine sculpture for a public square like his previous book, “No Matter How Loud I Shout” about the juvenile justice system. He’s built this true story of a man unfairly convicted of killing his wife from a human being, a marriage, a town, a community, a desert and a crime that challenges all our fears and priorities.

Set in Bakersfield, “Mean Justice” reveals the crucible for truth, race and politics that is Kern County. In July 1992, Pat Dunn calls the police to report his wife missing. Still reeling from several ring crimes, including an appalling child molestation case, Kern County is in the grip of an anti-crime hysteria that, Humes shows, threatens the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, in Bakersfield and across the country. Pressures on city council people, judges, D.A.s and prosecutors to identify and punish perpetrators leads to Dunn’s wrongful arrest. He remains in prison at the end of the book. This is the same seamless, honest and also lyrical writing that earned Humes a Pulitzer Prize.

THE COMING OF POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY; A Venture in Social Forecasting; By Daniel Bell; Basic Books: 508 pp., $17.50 paper

Today it has become commonplace to observe that we live in a post-industrial society in which the old ideologies of left and right are moribund. None of this was obvious in 1973, when Daniel Bell published “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.” Reissued by BasicBooks, with a new 30,000-word foreword by the author, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” is that rarest of things, a book the passage of time has made more timely, one that cries out for a fresh consideration on the eve of the 21st century.

“The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” is a book as worthy of rereading as it has been worthy of re-writing. The fact that it is a masterly explanation of the trends shaping our time makes it a pity that in many ways it is a product of a time that has passed. Bell, an encyclopedic polymath, resembles today’s academic specialists less than he does the 18th century philosophes or the 19th century philosophers. In a university system captured by pedants and ideologues, it is unlikely that any prestigious university would hire a brilliant generalist like Bell or publish books as ambitious as his. In a media market increasingly subordinate to the entertainment industry, it is unlikely that major trade publishers could be found for the contemporary equivalents of Bell’s major works. Bell, who foresaw our own time so accurately, reminds us of an earlier more serious and thoughtful age.

Writing in 1999, Bell introduces his summa with a summary of what he has learned in a long and productive life: “Like many advances in human history, post-industrial developments promise men and women greater control of their social destinies. But this is only possible under conditions of intellectual freedom and open political institutions, the freedom to pursue truth against those who wish to restrict it. This is the alpha and omega of the alphabet of knowledge.”

ELEGY FOR IRIS; By John Bayley; St. Martin’s Press: 288 pp., $22.95

The death of novelist Iris Murdoch has made John Bayley’s portrait of their marriage an elegy in the truest sense of the word. As new readers discover Murdoch and her legacy, Bayley’s memoir offers a touching and decidedly British look at who Murdoch was beyond the pages of her books. What is most refreshing about “Elegy for Iris” is how well Bayley has captured the complex, layered, rich, rewarding and confounding nature of a life lived with another and yet demonstrates how challenging it is to take measure of a marriage. “Elegy for Iris” is more than a memoir; it is also a heart-wrenching and brilliant illness narrative, depicting the parallel trials of both the patient and the caregiver. Here, between the covers of an incredible book, is love heroic, love that doesn’t hedge, love for which there are no ready outs, love that feels as inevitable as breathing, and the result is stunning.

WOMAN; An Intimate Geography; By Natalie Angier; Houghton Mifflin: 416 pp., $25

One knows early on one is reading a classic--a text so necessary and abundant and true that all efforts of its kind, for decades before and after it, will be measured by it. It is the writing, of course. Voice-driven, image-rich, by turns celebratory, incantational, doubtful and debunking, wondrous and robust and patient in its explanations, free ranging in its inquiries, ever on the look out for metaphor and icon and signs of intelligent life--it is the writing that makes the impression permanent. Long after the prizes and honors--and there should be plenty of these--Natalie Angier’s “Woman” will continue to instruct and inspire and argue for the species that so intrigues her and that she so clearly understands. “Woman” is a text that instructs a species, not only a gender. To broaden the understanding of what it means to be female is to broaden the contemplation of what it means to be male. So much depends on our knowledge of each other. After a careful read of this essential book, men should pass it along to someone they love--their sons, daughters, therapists or stockbrokers, golf and fishing buddies, lovers and spouses. For a fresh look into life’s sciences and sense and the pure pleasure of language in service to the facts of life, Angier’s “Woman” is as good as it gets. Here’s hoping she plans a companion volume.

ST. AUGUSTINE; By Garry Wills; Lipper / Viking: 152 pp., $19.95

“St. Augustine” by Garry Wills is the fourth title in the Penguin Lives series, a library of short biographies from Lipper/Viking Books that already includes Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, Edmund White on Proust and Peter Gay on Mozart. Appropriately enough, the title of the series obliquely recalls Plutarch’s “Lives” and thereby reminds us that the biographies of great men and women have always been mined for secret and sometimes exalted meanings. This biography of Augustine is compounded in equal measure of fact and exegesis, all of it offered up in elegant prose. “Mountains he had known from boyhood, but not the sea,” Wills writes of Augustine’s childhood in North Africa, a line that scans like a poem.

THE COLOR OF TRUTH; McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms; By Kai Bird Simon & Schuster: 496 pp., $27.50

McGeorge and William Bundy were high among those Americans best qualified, by training and aptitude, for public leadership in the period following World War II. Born into the Eastern Establishment whose basic reference points were military preparedness and internationalism, they were also proteges of its conspicuous leaders, including Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson and Walter Lippmann. Predictably, both Bundys rose to high policy positions in the national security establishment during the dangerous Cold War years of the 1960s. Mac Bundy served at the apex, as national security advisor to President Kennedy and later to President Johnson; Bill Bundy was the Pentagon official in charge of international affairs and then assistant secretary of state for the Far East. Both were deeply involved in the crises of that period, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the narrowly resolved Cuban missile crisis and the confrontation with Khrushchev over Germany and the Berlin Wall. But it was their pivotal participation in the self-reinforcing misjudgments and dramatic failures of the Vietnam War that made them emblematic figures in the demise of the Eastern Establishment as the preeminent influence in U.S. foreign policy. Kai Bird’s keenly perceptive, thoroughly researched, fair and balanced book explores the major influences--their Boston Brahmin background; their education at Groton, Yale and Harvard; and eminent statesmen and intellectuals who served as their role models--which gave the Bundy brothers exceptional self-assurance, mental toughness, a powerful sense of duty to country, unswerving loyalty to established authority and the conviction that American interests must prevail in the Cold War against the phenomenon of international communism, which had emerged from World War II as the mortal new challenge to the survival of a democratic world order. Unfortunately, these admirable qualities, when applied without an intuitive sense of larger realities and values beyond the strictures of bureaucratic imperatives, led to hubris and disastrous failure in Vietnam. In this failure, of course, the Bundys were hardly alone. The author’s detailed account of their major roles in the Vietnam imbroglio adds significantly to the historical record.

WALKING SINCE DAYBREAK; A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century; By Modris Eksteins; Houghton Mifflin:; 258 pp., $27.50

“Walking Since Daybreak” is a deeply moving and intellectually challenging view of modern history and its meaning for modern man. Modris Eksteins, the Canadian historian whose prize-winning “Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age” received wide praise, was born in Latvia in 1943. A history of the little Baltic community, and sometime state, of Latvia, this book is also a moving family and personal history and a meditation on the nature of history itself.

Eksteins and his family were buffeted by the titanic struggles of the German and the Russian armies that tore through the borderlands of Eastern Europe toward the end of World War II. In the vast migrations of millions of Europeans at the end of the war, the Eksteins, walking and walking, managed to make it to a camp for displaced persons--the “D.P.s”--in Germany and from there to Canada. In its fresh look at the legacy of World War II, Eksteins’ fine book builds a frame in which the crucial questions of modern history and its meaning are, insistently, to be asked.

NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO; The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton; By Christopher Hitchens; Verso: 160 pp., $20

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and deliberate controversialist, has long sensed that there’s something rotten at Clinton’s core, and in “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton,” a stinging polemic, he lets fly. As a controversialist, Hitchens likes to shock. He’ll say things few others would. Hitchens rejects the distinction, made by Clinton supporters during the impeachment proceedings, between Clinton’s private and public behavior. (“Clinton’s private vileness meshed exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style.”) Hitchens obviously loathes Clinton, finds him a lying, ruthless low-life. But in this compelling, disturbing, entertaining, necessary book, he raises questions that cannot be ignored.

CRAZY HORSE; By Larry McMurtry; Lipper / Viking: 148 pp., $19.95

Larry McMurtry, with subtlety and elegant prose, paints the life of Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior whose generalship closed down the Bozeman Trail and brought Custer to his reckoning at the Little Big Horn. In the process, McMurtry tells us how little we know about a tribe that left no written record and how much we imagine we know, thanks to historians who have turned myth into presumed reality: “When Stephen Ambrose says that 40,000 arrows were shot during the 20 or 30 minutes that it took the Sioux and Cheyenne to kill all the soldiers in the Fetterman massacre, I feel that what I’m getting is a trope, not a fact. Who would have been counting arrows on that cold day in Wyoming in 1866?”

McMurtry not only tells us of Crazy Horse’s unconquerable devotion to the free life of a Plains Indian and to the land over which he roamed, he also reveals what it meant (and still means) to be a leader, as Crazy Horse understood when, in 1877, after a desperate winter of starvation, he brought his 900-member band back to the Great Sioux Reservation, which had been set up by the government to contain the tribe: “Crazy Horse was not tamable, not a man of politics. He could only assist his people as a warrior and hunter--a bureaucrat he was not. Had there not been those 900 people looking to him for help, he might have elected to do what Geronimo did for so long: take a few warriors and a few women and stay out . . . But it was true that these 900 people depended on him, so he brought them in and sat down, for the first time, in council with the white man.”

There is simple beauty in that act of courage (which led to his assassination), all the more because it comes unadorned by exaggeration or overemphasis. That is history, both poetic and relevant, at its best.

THE PIANIST; By Wladyslaw Szpilman; Picador: 222 pp., $23

“The Pianist,” Wladyslaw Szpilman’s remarkable memoir of his survival in Warsaw between the years 1939 and 1945, is a significant contribution to the literature of remembrance, a document of lasting historical and human value. Unforgivably overlooked since its publication (in Polish) in 1946 and translated into English just now for the first time, the book is a relative rarity: an account of the Holocaust written in the immediate aftermath of the experience itself. It has all the rawness and specificity of horrors painfully and uncomprehendingly withstood and afterward just as uncomprehendingly--but necessarily--recorded. Writing this book would seem to have been a further act of survival by a man who performed more of them in six years than most human beings do in a lifetime. At the center of this book is of the largest hows in all of human inquiry: how one people set about systematically and relentlessly annihilating another. It is a how that Szpilman tells with clarity, intelligence, candor, courage. It is the how that must be told again and again and again.

There are many ways to read a book about the Holocaust, and one of them, surely, inevitably, is to try to answer the unanswerable: What makes one man endure when so many others succumb? We can only learn from those who testify; the others of course are mute. From Szpilman’s testimony we learn this: It is an ineffable and wholly unpredictable mixture of fate, determination, accident, instinct. To know Wladyslaw Szpilman is, in the most hopeless of contexts, to know a modicum of hope.

THE NORTON BOOK OF AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY; Edited by Jay Parini; W.W. Norton: 712 pp., $32.50

The range of autobiographies and autobiographers in this collection is nothing short of startling. These texts from ex-slaves, women, immigrants, former child laborers and radical activists are, so many years later, so fresh, so alive with the wonders of self-expression and self-invention, that they frame the canonical texts of American autobiography in new ways. Jay Parini’s editorial sense opens up radically new ways of considering the autobiographical form. His selections make an unimpeachable case for autobiography as this country’s one true democratic form of writing and for the almost unbearable richness of that democratic impulse. His collection is also a reminder that democratic America was never the same as American democracy; for much of what can be experienced in this large volume is a history of the journeys, struggles and spirit of the disenfranchised who refused to let their lives be dismissed. This collection, inconceivable not long ago, gives diversity a good name. There is no better evidence of how enriched we’ve been. Special thanks must be offered to Parini--and to Norton--for allowing this singing of the American body eclectic.

THE ARCANUM; The Extraordinary True Story; By Janet Gleeson; Warner: 326 pp., $23

A delicately wrought teacup, a dinner plate, a porcelain figurine: common household objects that most of us take for granted, however much we may value them. But until the beginning of the 18th century, no one in Europe knew exactly how--or of what--the exquisite porcelain from China and Japan was actually made. Europeans knew how to fashion a heavier, more porous earthenware from clay, to glaze and paint it, but this was a far cry from the brilliantly white, translucent, graceful china from the Far East that European royalty and other connoisseurs were eagerly collecting. Although travelers from the time of Marco Polo tried to find out how the Chinese made these beautiful objects, the formula and the process were closely guarded secrets. In her highly informative and immensely readable “The Arcanum,” Janet Gleeson tells the fascinating story of how a young German alchemist named Johann Bottger discovered the secret of making porcelain. Gleeson, a London-based writer who has worked for Sotheby’s auction house, has fashioned a riveting narrative, richly detailed and vividly descriptive. Although her book is an exemplary piece of storytelling, it is not a novel but a work of popular history. No invented dialogue has been put into the mouths of the characters; there are notes to each chapter and an index at the end. But thanks to Gleeson’s skillful, lucid narration, the story she tells in “The Arcanum” is as enthralling as any historical fiction.

FAREWELL, PROMISED LAND; Waking from the California Dream; Text by Gray Brechin Photographs by Robert Dawson; University of California Press: 254 pp., $60 hardcover, $35 paper

“Farewell, Promised Land,” a collaboration between photographer Robert Dawson and geographer Gray Brechin, impressively adds to the recent books (among them, Greg Hise’s “Magnetic Los Angeles,” Norman Klein’s “The History of Forgetting” and William Fulton’s “The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles”) that reconsider the condition of our lives in California 150 years after American conquest and statehood. By mingling history, environmental reporting, photojournalism and a tragic poetry of place, Dawson and Brechin expose California as the epicenter of all ruined paradises and, as a consequence, now fully our home. The book began as a 1995 tour the writer and photographer took through the landscape of their regret, mostly in Northern California and the Central Valley. It’s not so much a waking from any sort of dream they found but a sobering up after a century and a half of California intoxication.

‘TIS; By Frank McCourt; Scribner: 368 pp., $26

“Angela’s Ashes” ends with 19-year-old Frank McCourt, born in the United States but raised in Ireland, coming back to his future on a ship from Cork. As he stands on the deck looking at the lights of America twinkling in the darkness, the ship’s wireless officer comes up to him and says, “Isn’t this a great country altogether?” And McCourt concludes that wondrous book with a chapter containing one word: “ ‘Tis.”

Like a literary trick out of James Joyce, the end was a beginning in disguise. In “ ‘Tis,” that one-word chapter becomes a book about what happens to McCourt in that great country he sees shimmering like a mirage in the distance. But while “Angela’s Ashes” is a book in which things fall apart, a child’s eye view of the social boneyard of Limerick and of a fractured family’s struggle for survival, it is told with grim comic brio that makes it paradoxically uplifting. The story in “ ‘Tis,” though not so dark, is also not so grand. If its predecessor was a song of innocence, this book--in some ways more an extended epilogue than a sequel--is a song of experience, a story filled with the compromise and puzzlement of adulthood made all the more ambiguous because it takes place in what always remains for McCourt a foreign land.

“ ‘Tis” has those elements that made “Angela’s Ashes” such a success--the narrative brio, the fierce sympathy for human tic and torment, the intuitive feel for character and above all the love of language and that very Irish understanding that words are our only weapon in our long quarrel with God.

THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION OF SOUTH AFRICA REPORT; Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Five volumes with CD-ROM; Grove’s Dictionaries Inc.: 3,500 pp., $250

That post-apartheid South Africa is a “miracle” is by now a commonplace. Just how miraculous that miracle was is confirmed by even a cursory glance through the pages of this extraordinary and indispensable document. It is a salutary and timely reminder of just how remarkable the transformation has been from the bad old days of apartheid, though at the same time confirmation that however terrible one may have imagined those days to be, nothing could prepare one for the reality painstakingly described in such convincing and overwhelming detail in this report.

For that, more than anything else, is the truly extraordinary achievement of the unique experiment embodied by the commission, which sought nothing less than to effect a genuine reconciliation among those who had sought at the cost of much blood and treasure to destroy one another. It was a vast and hugely ambitious undertaking. The commission’s report deserves the widest possible readership. For the issues of injustice and revenge and reconciliation, the deep wounds that history inflicts upon us that make healing all but impossible, are issues that transcend the specific circumstances of the South African experience.

WINSTON AND CLEMENTINE; The Personal Letters of the Churchills; Edited by Mary Soames; Houghton Mifflin: 702 pp., $35

Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier met in 1904, when he was 29 and she 19. Four years later, they fell in love and married. Their correspondence, spanning the years 1908 to 1964, contains some 1,700 items: letters, telegrams, notes, memoranda. This hefty 702-page volume, edited by their youngest daughter, Mary Soames, contains many but not all of their missives. That publishers were unwilling to issue a two-volume set of the Churchills’ correspondence says something less than flattering about the state of the book business, for these letters are exceptionally valuable on any number of fronts--from the insights they offer into the politics and history of the 20th century to the intimate portrait they provide of a very good, if hardly perfect, marriage. Soames has done a splendid job of supplying the reader with almost everything needed to follow the story that these letters tell: Headnotes to each chapter set the stage, footnotes explain the references and a family tree, photographs and maps help complete the picture. Candid, expressive, shrewdly perceptive and vividly descriptive, these letters offer a revealing glimpse of the private faces of two celebrated public persons.

THE CULTURE OF FEAR; Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things; By Barry Glassner; Basic Books: 276 pp., $25

USC sociologist Barry Glassner has written a gutsy expose of one of the most widespread delusions of our time: misplaced fear. Glassner demonstrates with precision and clarity that Americans today have built what he calls a “culture of fear” by buying into rumors and hearsay that pass for facts. Who traffics in fear-mongering? Follow the money, says Glassner, to the politicians when they win elections by grossly exaggerating (and sometimes outright lying about) crime and drug use percentages under their opponent’s watch. To advocacy groups that profit because nothing drives fund-raisers faster than expectations of doom, which promise to be thwarted just in time if the donor’s contribution is beefy enough. To conservatives decrying the demise of the family and to liberals proclaiming the destruction of the environment. Most of what we dread, as Glassner convincingly argues, is the vaporous byproduct of a culture of fear of which we are both creators and victims.

THE COUSINS’ WARS; Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America; By Kevin Phillips; Basic Books: 708 pp., $32.50

Political junkies who think of Kevin Phillips primarily as a prognosticator--as most do because “The Emerging Republican Majority,” his first book, predicted the outcome of the Reagan Revolution 11 years before it hit--can hardly be prepared for “The Cousins’ Wars,” an attempt to describe the grand pattern of political development in the last four centuries of English and American history. Historians will take exception to his use of evidence and his argument, and some are bound to find the whole enterprise dubious. They will make a mistake, however, if they dismiss his arguments out of hand, for both academics and general readers can profit from this book. “The Cousins’ Wars” succeeds in breaking down the parochial barriers that confine historians and encourages them to think more broadly about what they know best. Even more important, however, historians need to pay sustained and critical attention to the grand narratives that implicitly shape their work by suggesting to them what questions are worth asking, what stories are worth telling. Such an inquiry has led Phillips to the disquieting recognition that only half our national history is the story of an American republic in which more and more groups have gained access to citizenship and the blessings of liberty. The other half, if Phillips is right, is the story of an American empire--and its implications are ones with which historians, and Americans in general, have not yet begun to grapple.

PLACES LEFT UNFINISHED AT THE TIME OF CREATION; By John Phillip Santos; Viking: 284 pp., $24.95

Not too long ago in Texas, children, if they were fair, were warned by well-meaning friends not to call themselves Mexican but Spanish. Down-sloping “Indian eyelashes” must be curled into a tilt. Those attitudes of European superiority have a strong historical parallel. In Mexico, the war against France produced a dictator, Porfirio Diaz, a mestizo who nevertheless became renowned for his European pretensions.

In his impressive memoir, John Phillip Santos (the name means “saints”) attempts to locate the origin of that lingering loss among the descendants of the conquered Indians, and he does so with grand success: imagining lives, roaming through myths, history and borrowed dreams. He embarks on several journeys of discovery: to find the truth of his grandfather’s drowning in the San Antonio River; to trace Hernan Cortes’ symbolic conquest of Mexico; and to retrieve the banished stories of his own family.

A sense of awe permeates his haunting book and lifts it above its easy categorization as the memoir of a Tejano, an appropriately elegant word for a Mexican American born or raised in Texas. (Santos does not use the word “Chicano.”) What a wonderful story he has told here, in a memoir that is a brave and beautiful attempt to redeem a people out of a limbo of forgetting.

THE BROKEN TOWER; The Life of Hart Crane; By Paul Mariani; W.W. Norton: 492 pp., $35

Hart Crane may well be among the three or four best American poets of this century. As his latest biographer, Paul Mariani, declares: “It would be difficult to find a serious poet or reader of poetry in this country today who has not been touched by something in Crane’s music.” But for many years, Crane remained, if not quite a marginal figure, certainly not one who received the amount of attention lavished on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams. A genuine 20th century Romantic visionary, Crane fell outside the Modernist canon. Nor did he seem to benefit much from the florescence of gay studies, even though he’d written some of the most splendid poetry ever to celebrate homosexual love. As a poet who sought out the richest language and most complex metaphors to express the kind of transcendent experience that resists being put into words, Crane could not be called easy or accessible. He was not the sort of writer who makes a good spokesman for a cause.

A poet as well as a scholar, Mariani has written biographies of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Williams. His passion for poetry in general and Crane’s poems in particular informs every page of his book. Mariani writes fluently, often lyrically, and with a momentum that keeps one turning the pages to see what will happen next. It’s a dramatic story, and Mariani isn’t afraid to tell it as dramatically and poignantly as it deserves.

THE VELVETEEN FATHER; An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood; By Jesse Green; Villard: 224 pp., $23.95

“The Velveteen Father,” Jesse Green’s brave, big-hearted chronicle of an alternative path to parenthood, is a book about where America is now--a most enlightened, evolved, compassionate America, at any rate, which is a place where the conventional family, famously breaking down, is also, in pockets, being carefully built up again. Green tells the story of how he and his partner, Andy, came to understand that they wanted to bring meaning to their lives by rearing children. “Is the traditional family so successful that it cannot stand experimentation?” Green asks, specifically with regard to his separate living (more accurately, working) quarters. The question, though, applies more generally to the family Andy and Green have built, and the answer, in our fractured contemporary world, is a resonant no.

THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE; By Peter Novick; Houghton Mifflin: 320 pp., $27

A professor of history at the University of Chicago who has written books on Vichy France and the problem of objectivity in American historiography, Peter Novick begins with a skeptic’s question: Given that great historical events are usually digested and dispensed with shortly after their occurrence, why is it that the Holocaust took on such importance at least a generation after the events had transpired?

“The Holocaust in American Life” tells the riveting story of this transformation. Novick’s tone is disciplined, and his research is meticulous, yet it is clear that his book wants to pick a fight with the guardians of Holocaust memory, as he argues that the current obsession with the Holocaust is bad for the Jews on both moral and pragmatic grounds. Although we would hope that commemoration would teach us all to be kinder, gentler citizens, Novick wonders whether the barrage of awfulness does not finally anesthetize us to smaller-scale suffering. Concomitantly, Novick questions whether centering the representation of Jewish experience on the Holocaust does not in the long run confirm the ancient stereotype of the Jew as a persecuted pariah.

Above all, Novick believes that by offering an image of themselves to the world as victims, Jews will grant Hitler a kind of posthumous victory. As Leon Wieseltier puts it, “In the memory of oppression, oppression outlives itself.” The scar does the work of the wound. With its stringent critique of transcendental humors and its steely-eyed allegiance to critical thinking, “The Holocaust in American Life” should change the terms and the tone of Holocaust debate in the United States. Novick has produced an admirable Jewish book.

SCARS OF SWEET PARADISE; The Life and Times of Janis Joplin; By Alice Echols; Metropolitan Books: 408 pp., $26

In the compelling new biography “Scars of Sweet Paradise,” Alice Echols promises to neither “pathologize nor normalize Janis.” And she doesn’t, presenting us instead with a richly detailed portrait of a woman who was simultaneously a sexual outcast and a sexual adventurer, a defiant bohemian and a needy junkie, a hippie-chick icon and a lonely isolate. Oh, yes, and a powerful artist too.

Even better, Echols resists the lure to either idealize or demonize the ‘60s counterculture that nourished Joplin. The author stares unflinchingly at the fault lines of that culture--its reckless encouragement of drug addictions, its sexism, its frequent narcissism, its capitulation to market values--without condemning the repudiation of constraints and the quest for freedom to which Joplin, and her peers, were so dedicated. “Janis refused the compromised, diminished life of her parents’ generation by taking a blowtorch to her own,” Echols writes. Joplin’s death was sad, but Echols never suggests that the ‘60s were a “mistake” or that the artist would have been better off had her life been smaller, safer or longer.

RUNAWAY SLAVES; Rebels on the Plantation, 1790-1860; By John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Oxford University Press: 456 pp., $35

No one has yet explored the fugitives’ world and its meaning for the slave experience more deeply and with greater sophistication than John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University and long the doyen of African American history, and Loren Schweninger, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the editor of a massive collection of petitions relating to slavery. Their “Runaway Slaves” greatly enhances our understanding of the system of slavery as it developed in the American South during the 19th century and the slaves’ determination to resist the plantation regime.

Running away, as Franklin and Schweninger demonstrate in one of the most original sections of their book, was an essential part of the slaves’ ongoing negotiations with their owners over the terms of work and life. When the opportunity arose, truants gladly took their liberty, but most made it clear that freedom was not their immediate goal. They would not return until their demands--visitation rights with a spouse, reduced labor, overwork payment, hiring privileges, access to garden plots or free time on Sunday or Saturday--were granted. Moreover, while most truants bargained for a better deal for themselves or their family, many spoke for the larger slave community. In unfolding the fugitives’ tale, Franklin and Schweninger contribute mightily to our understanding of how the system of slavery stood for nearly three centuries and why it eventually fell.

MIND OF THE RAVEN; By Bernd Heinrich; HarperCollins: 380 pp., $25

Bernd Heinrich is a professor of biology and the author of several naturalist classics, including “Ravens in Winter,” “A Year in the Maine Woods” and “Bumblebee Economics.” He is one of the finest living examples of that strange hybrid: the scientist writer. He builds to the miraculous in his subjects. He watches and listens and includes his own efforts, his own learning curve in the telling. He provides, through ravens or bumblebees or whatever he happens to be looking at, new definitions for words like mind, consciousness and intelligence and breathes new life into them.

In this book, after decades of studying ravens, raising them, living with them, traveling around the world to meet them, Heinrich hopes to engage the reader to “participate in the quest of exploring another mind.” He travels to Alaska (where ravens, he discovers, have larger brains) and Germany and to the Inuit community of Iqaluit west of Greenland, where he talks with old hunters who describe how the ravens have traditionally helped the humans find their prey. He studies individual recognition and vocal expression, discovers ravens’ ability to distinguish between friends and foes, that they recruit other ravens to share food not from the bait but from roosts which act as information centers. He experiments with ravens adopting other ravens’ babies and questions the truism that ravens mate for life and are monogamous. He studies the importance of novelty and boredom in young ravens’ education, their playfulness and their morals. “We’ll never find proof of the existence of consciousness by picking the animal apart,” he writes.

All we know is that no definition of God has ever made us feel as comfortable, small and important in the universe as Heinrich’s insight into the mind of the raven.

GALILEO’S DAUGHTER; A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love; By Dava Sobel; Walker & Co.: 448 pp., $25

Standing on the watershed between ancient and modern science, Galileo, in his writings and through his fate, has continued to raise a variety of fundamental questions that persist to this day. Some examples: If God can be known through the scriptures, can He also be apprehended through science? Or are the findings of science and the dogma of religion doomed to be antagonists? How much “evidence” is needed to make a scientific revolution in the first place? What happens when such a major change is proposed, both to the originator and to society itself? What lessons for today may be drawn from the story of the political-ideological battle waged by well-armed enthusiasts against a major scientist or scientific theory?

These are among the timely problems skillfully woven into the new biography of Galileo by Dava Sobel, also the author of the fascinating book, “Longitude.” Her “Galileo’s Daughter” is a gripping story, whose main characters are the brilliant but doomed scientist, his adoring and ingenious daughter, Virginia, and the extraordinarily zealous Pope Urban VIII. While the events cover the span of Galileo’s life from 1564 to 1642, some of them seem strangely familiar from the latest news stories emerging from, say, a current inquisitor in Washington or a school board in Kansas.

Much of Galileo’s own work and struggles are known to scholars, but the main points are here laid out skillfully and with an eye for the telling detail. In recent years, Pope John Paul II has taken new interest in Galileo’s views and his condemnation, concluding that the historic encounter had been “a tragic mutual incomprehension” rather than “a fundamental opposition between science and faith.”

Indeed, during his visit to his native Poland last June, John Paul II made a point of lauding Copernicus in a speech at the Copernicus University, in the astronomer’s birth town of Torun. It is only the latest twist, and surely not the last, in the tale of Galileo, and, thanks to Sobel’s new book, also that of his daughter.

THE BLACK ROOM AT LONGWOOD; Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena; By Jean-Paul Kauffmann Four Walls Eight Windows: 298 pp., $25

Jean-Paul Kauffmann, in this story of his nine days spent on St. Helena, never mentions his own experience of exile: While working as a reporter for Le Figaro in Beirut, he was taken hostage and held for three years in a basement by Shiite Muslims. He doesn’t have to mention it--every pore, every clause in the book is informed by it. Kauffmann visited Longwood, the house Napoleon lived in from 1815 until his death at 52 in 1821, to get the smell of the place, to put all the facts and all the books he has read about Napoleon into a human skin. “I only had to breathe the air, the odor of a damp cellar mixed with a strange tropical perfume . . . to become aware of the dimension of time on St. Helena.” If St. Helena is menacing, a maritime prison on a pile of rocks, Longwood is equally haunted and haunting. “Captivity is above all a smell,” Kauffmann writes, “an incommunicable odor of humiliation.” He has a sense of time moving backward, “eating slowly away in the dark.” “I know that rumbling sound,” he writes, “that vague menacing presence is nothing but the murmur of time, the fermentation of memory.” The story of Napoleon’s last years is beautifully int